Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - CIA Analyst David McCloskey: How People Are Really Recruited, Manipulated, and Broken

Episode Date: January 29, 2026

David McCloskey is a former CIA analyst and consultant at McKinsey & Company. While at the CIA, he wrote regularly for the President’s Daily Brief, delivered classified testimony to Congressional oversight committees, and briefed senior White House officials, Ambassadors, military officials, and Arab royalty. He worked in CIA field stations across the Middle East. During his time at McKinsey, David advised national security, aerospace, and transportation clients on a range of strategic and operational issues. Get his brilliant book The Persian: A Novel in the US: https://amzn.to/3ZIH8cY Get the book UK edition here: https://amzn.eu/d/hOj2E9O Listen to The Rest is Classified here: https://open.spotify.com/show/1Jn1HIW6I1AQnKVpsJHdEf?si=3df26c58499b4290 Anthony Scaramucci is the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge, a global alternative investment firm, and founder and chairman of SALT, a global thought leadership forum and venture studio. He is the host of the podcast Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci. A graduate of Tufts University and Harvard Law School, he lives in Manhasset, Long Island. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Even governments that don't really provide any significant socioeconomic benefits to their people that are deeply repressive and that have really lost all of their legitimacy narrative. The Iranian idea that the Islamic Republic is sort of a legitimate government, I think, by most of its people. That's gone. I say this after having worked on Syria at the CIA during the Arab Spring and watching how, you know, Assad held on, lost a lot of power, lost a lot of territory, changed the nature of his government, but held on until 2024, a 13-year civil war, essentially, and killed 700,000 people. I feel like in that culture, whether it's Saddam Hussein, Assad, the Iranian Republican army, their attitude is we're going to fight to the last man standing and die in the seat. I mean, Assad ultimately left. He was forced out by Putin, but it feels like they will just hold on gripping to the bitter end. Am I right in saying that? Welcome to the Open Book.

I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining me today is a bestselling author, David McCloskey. He's a former CIA analyst. He's a podcast host. He's a podcast brother of mine, actually. He is the co-host of The Rest is classified for Gollhanger. another Goalhanger great podcast, which is brilliant. So please download his podcast.

You'll learn a lot about David and incredible history of so many different things that have gone on with the CIA and MI6, et cetera. But we're going to talk about the Persian, which is a novel that David has written. His previous books include the seventh floor, Damascus Station, and Moscow 10 or Moscow X, but I call it Moscow 10. But David, what a great book the Persian is. And thank you. And a little bit of trivia. David and I are born on Trump's Insurrection Day. It used to be our birthday, David, the 6th of January.

We've been celebrating it since before it was cool to celebrate. Right. Yeah, but now it's Trump Liberation Day, David. So, you know, anyway. But anyway, great to have you on. Let's start with the rest is classified, if you don't mind. I'd like to talk a little bit about that show. while you're doing that feather in a little bit of your background and tell us why our viewers and listeners should be downloading the rest is classified.

And I'm proud to say, by the way, I'm a paying founding member of the rest is classified. Oh, thank you. Yeah, I like my goal. I like my goal hanger. I like a little bit of goal hanger in my life. All right, but tell us a little bit about the show first. Then we'll get into the book. Yeah.

So the rest is classified, which I co-host with Gordon Carrera. And I should note, Anthony, you have been a sort of celebrated guest on the podcast. We did some episodes on the Kennedy assassination and you came on and, you know, we had some fun. You treated to be very shabbily, I'll say. Yes. I get bad reviews for that. So I have to offer you. You got, yeah.

Our club members were disappointed with your behavior. Some of our, yes, I did read some of the reviews. I was sort of teasing. Sometimes the British people don't get the American humor. That's true. I do apologize to you for my teasing, but I just, you know, I have a point of view on the Kennedy assassination that you and Dominic Sambrook do not share, which is fine. You're the more normal establishment types.

But I do appreciate you bringing me on. We had a lot of fun. We had a lot of fun. So the rest is classified, which I co-host with Gordon Carrera, is a podcast that focuses on Stories from espionage sort of past and present. So we tell great stories about spies. And those could be stories from the Cold War. We're doing a series right now on Kim Filby, probably arguably the most notorious traitor in British espionage history, maybe in anyone's history. We did a story earlier this month about the raid to apprehend slash kidnap Nicholas Maduro out of his. PJs. So we're looking at stuff that's going on now. We're looking at stuff that's going on way back when. And the idea is to really peel back the curtain and talk a lot about, you know, for example, in the Maduro Raid podcast, how does that happen? How do you actually conduct a raid like that? What is the

integration necessary between intelligence services and special forces, special operations to do that kind of thing. So we try to get into details about how the world of espionage and intelligence agencies actually work in each story and make it a good time. And I like to hassle Gordon Carrera because he's very British

and we have fun with that as well. So we do two episodes a week, three for our club members and we've been going for a little over a year now and having a lot of fun with it. You know, you talk about Kim Filby. So for our viewers and listeners, Kim Filby was part of the British establishment.

a well-regarded person. And of course, he was a trader. He was selling secrets or converted to the KGB and he was selling secrets. And, you know, we had something similar in Alger Hiss, right, in the U.S. Right. Now, a lot of people thought that Alger Hish was an establishmentarian. He went to all the right schools. Richard Nixon, Whitaker Chambers, accused him of the same thing. So before, again, before we get in the book, what turns a spy, David? Well, yeah, we've actually done a lot of episodes on this question because it's a little bit different for everybody. You know, there is, there's a very, I think, overused acronym that still is somewhat directionally useful. It's mice, M-I-C-E, money, ideology, control or coercion, and ego.

And those those four things are oftentimes, you know, sort of referred to as the potential motivation. for why people commit espionage. And it's not totally wrong, but it sort of misses the very complicated human stew that's at the heart of all of these traitors, really, and the betrayal, not just of secrets and country, but oftentimes of friends and family and coworkers and that kind of thing. And so, you know, a lot of the case officers,

the CIA case officers that we've interviewed for the pod, talk about why people spy in terms of cracks and seams inside individual humans. So this idea that people have particular areas where they are broken, where they have vulnerabilities, where they want things. Sometimes they don't even know they want them. And a really good case officer, a really good handling officer, is able to help that person discover things, that they might not even know themselves,

that they actually want and then give them those things. And so it's a complicated picture, but, you know, the way it often looks in these kind of case officer agent handler relationships and why people end up becoming spies can look a lot like, you know, somewhat offering marital advice or someone stepping in if someone needs some extra bunny. It's very basic human stuff that often gets this relationship going and gets someone down a path to, you know, betraying everything that they hold dear. I think this is a good segue, actually, because in the Persian, you talk about a very complicated situation. You have an ancient friendship between the Persians and the Israelites. And these people ancestrally were reasonably close. The Shah of Iran was considered an ally of the United States and of Israel. And now you have this ideological regime that has suppressed this very large, educated popular. of people for 46 or 47 years, and there's a fight going on.

And so there's like everything you talk about. There's ideology. There's suppression of freedom. There's one country is worried about its existential survival. The other country is worried about perpetrating or continuing its sort of radical Islamic republic. Take us into the story of the Persian. and what inspires you to write about this conflict?

So the Persian is set in the very kind of real present-day shadow war between Israel and Iran. So this is a story. It's not about Iran's program. This is not a story about the war in Gaza. This is a story about the intelligence conflict between Israel and Iran. And the thing that got me going on this was, as I said, started to look into the history of really Israeli, you know, Assad, their foreign intelligence agency, targeted assassinations, targeted killings of people in Iran. Nuclear scientists,

engineers, military officials, list goes on and on. It goes back to about 2007 when this policy started. And I thought it could be really interesting to flip that on its head and say, what if the Iranians had that capability, albeit at a kind of smaller scale, to do that inside Israel? What if they built that capability? And what would it look like then for the Israelis to try to stop those attacks and to hunt down the people responsible for that? And so the story really grew out of this kind of what-if construct around the shadow war and flipping some of the real dynamics inside it on its head and saying, okay, how do I construct a kind of cat, mouse game between Mossad and between the Iranians that has some really interesting characters at its center. Of course, I mean, like any good spy novel, Anthony, this one's got a dentist

right at the middle of it. Yeah. Listen, I, you know, it's not really a dentist, though, right? There's a lot going on there, right? Okay, so. Former dentist. Right, former dentist. Okay, so an ordinary man living in a quiet life in Stockholm who, it turns out, it's a story about normal people doing extraordinary things, right? Or abnormal things, right? And so we, what do we know from your experience in life? We don't know who the heroes are, right? They get to the battlefield. You think the Mancho guy is the hero? And it's the young corporal that's carrying people on his back, back to the Tent Hospital. Right? We never really know who the heroes are, right? What makes the hero, David? Well, I'm kind of a sucker for these stories.

where you have the very ordinary person who looks a lot like all of us and who's not been brought up as a case officer, as a spy, who doesn't have any family members who have done this kind of work and who just gets sucked into something much bigger than himself, right?

So that's kind of our protagonist is this guy named Cameron, goes by Cam, Esfahadi, who, you know, as a, as a, scientist in Sweden realizes that, you know, he wants out, he wants more money, he's quite selfish and greedy and very self-interested. So a lot like a lot of us. And he wants to go to California, wants a new life. Also something I think a lot of us can relate to. But the way he gets there is that the Israelis, you know, Mossad puts someone in his dental chair and basically makes him an offer that he sort of can't refuse but also doesn't really want to refuse. and ends up in this game. Ends up in this game, look, you know, he said that mice acronym. He ends up in this game for money,

but at a deeper level, he ends up in this game because he is disconnected for personal freedom. He's disconnected from his family. He's really a sort of unruited person who's wandering and who stumbles into somebody from Mossad who's got answers for him. Answers that he sort of thought he wanted, but as it's put to him by this guy in his dental chair,

he realizes that's what he wants and he goes after it. And he ends up playing, you know, this very dangerous game for the rest of the novel. It's going to the general, who I thought was perhaps the most chilling character. Okay, he's terrifying to me because he's so believable. So let's talk a little bit about him. Yeah, believe it or not,

elements of this character, the general, I based off of my dear, editor, my editor at WW Norton, who has been my editor for all four of my novels until he passed in the last five or six months. Guy by the name of Star Lawrence, who's an absolute legend at Norton and publishing. But who was the most savage critic of, you know, bad style, a bad story, terrible prose? I mean, he was just absolutely ruthless. And so the general is this, he's an Iranian interrogator who has our, it's not spoiling anything, although, you know, there is, we should say for listeners, there is hopefully a surprise ending here, which I don't think we want to give away.

But it's not spoiling anything to say that this operation that Cam gets involved in goes totally sideways and he ends up in prison, in Iran, under the general's care. and he's writing much of the book as his confession three years on before he's presumably going to be executed. He's writing for the general. The general has him writing over and over and over again, in part because that's a piece of how you extract the truth from somebody in a situation like this, but also because the general is quite sadistic and enjoys it. And so he has Cam writing, you know, Cam writes the romance version of the story. He writes the Scandia noir version of the story. he writes the spy version of the story.

And the general is kind of editing this thing over and over again, over the years, as, as Cam sort of continues to linger in captivity, just waiting for the end. But the general is this kind of, you know, he's meant to be, hopefully, an unsettling character because he's got Cam in a really terrible position. You know, I learned a lot in the book. You know, I love reading spy books because I'm not a spy, and I want to learn. learn what's lurking under the surface of our lives in terms of people, how they surveil people, or potentially target the assassination. And without revealing classified secrets, of course, how did your real world experience inform you to the details here of what you're writing about?

Well, it really does inform pretty much everything I do in the writing, because I really try, you know, the way I write is the character. come out of the setting and the plot comes out of the characters. And so I try to get the characters right. And what I mean by that in the context of an intelligence story is that my characters, you know, in this novel, one of them is, you know, a case officer for Mossad, Israel's Foreign Intelligence Service. Another one is the asset, Cam, right, who's recruited by Mossad. Well, to kind of get the characters right, you have to have an understanding of how does this work in the real world in the same way that if you were writing a character who was a cop and you didn't do any research at all on what it's actually like to be a police officer, you didn't talk to police officers,

you didn't engage with any of the sort of process that they deal with, didn't learn the vocabulary, you would have a novel, you would have a character at the center of a, you know, police procedural that just isn't going to feel right. And I think in the same way, I'm trying to create a feeling of authenticity of these novels by sort of breathing that into the characters.

And so practically the way I do that is I spend a lot of time with former CIA officers and I ask them a lot of questions. I put a lot of what if scenarios to them. I did the same with Mossad officers in this book, try to fight them and get them to talk to me and put the same questions to them about how Mossad operates and how it's different from the CIA. and, you know, a little bit harder to get in touch with Iranian intelligence officers, but spoke to a lot of Iranians about living in Tehran, about the regime, about what its intelligence services are like, what it's like to be held by them, and kind of infuse the novel with a lot of that research. So use the reader, latch on to these kind of details and feel like you're being pulled into a different world.

To me, it's a human story. And I think a lot of this is going on on our political. realm. Hear me out for a second. We know what's right and we know when governments are acting in behaving in the right sort of way and in the wrong sort of. We just know this. It's our intuition. You know, we could look at something very quickly. It's like Malcolm Gladwell says, we just blink and know it's right and know it's wrong. The Iranian people, the majority of them know what's going on in the country is wrong. How much longer do you, think that wrongness will survive?

You know, this is, this is the question. And it's one, you know, I just say, Gordon and I did a couple Iran episodes on the rest is classified on exactly this question of how hard, how should you look at a regime and its stability and how or can you predict when these things might tip. And, you know, it's interesting. I think, I think regimes sadly, really nasty autocratic regimes that massacre their own people, such as the Iranian one, can unfortunately remain in power for a long time. You know, killing your way out of something is a viable strategy, unfortunately. And even governments that don't really provide any significant socioeconomic benefits to their people that are deeply repressive and that have really lost all

you know, their legitimacy narrative. You know, the Iranian idea that the Islamic Republic is sort of a legitimate government, I think, by most of its people. I think that's gone. But it's really, it's quite a sad thing. I say this after having worked on Syria at the CIA during the Arab Spring and watching how, you know, Assad held on, lost a lot of power, lost a lot of territory, changed the nature of his government. but man, held on until 2024, you know, a 13-year civil war, essentially.

Killed a lot of people, you know, and killed 700,000 people. Yeah. I mean, I'm going to make an observation and you tell me if you think is accurate. I feel like in that culture, whether it's Saddam Hussein, Assad, the Iranian Republican army, their attitude is we're going to fight to the last man standing and, you know, die in the seat. I mean, Assad ultimately left, he was forced out by Putin. But it feels like they will just hold on gripping to the bitter end. Am I right in saying that? I think in this context, it is that's a much more likely outcome than some kind of negotiated end or elements of the leadership stepping down.

You know, I think also it's much less likely given, I mean, you look at the, obviously there's a lot of uncertainty right now around the death toll so far. but it seems like tens of thousands of people died over a two-day period on January 8th and January 9th. It's a lot harder once you've done that as a leadership to imagine how you get to some kind of negotiated end or you'd even want it. And so, yeah, I think it's much more likely to become much more violent before there would be a transition or you'd slip into this kind of civil war, civil conflict kind of scenario before you'd get to some kind of transition, unfortunately. Okay, so you're a powerful, powerful storyteller because I look at the novel, and yes, it's about the spy craft, it's about the increase in the suspense. But you've woven into this novel forgiveness, personal survival. It's a love story. And so you're like a compassionate dude, David.

So talk about this. You sound surprised, Anthony. You sound surprised by this. I'm not as probably as compassionate as you. I mean, I don't know. I'm blown away by the human qualities. Not really surprised, by the way. I know you're a brilliant guy and I know you're a man of letter.

So I'm not really surprised. But I love this aspect of the story. So talk a little bit about that. I think a lot of stories in the spy genre. And it makes damn good sense most of the time. End up being pretty dark, pretty gritty. you're dealing with a lot of, frankly, a lot of nasty stuff, right? You're dealing with people who betray other people and betray loved ones,

and you're dealing with people who are deceiving other people and lying. And, you know, that's not the whole essence of the spy game, but it is a piece of it and it's a way it comes across a lot in spy novels. And when I was writing this one, I thought, you know, I don't know if I want to explore those kind of themes as much. I mean, there's a lot of that at the book. But I was fascinated because I read at some point early in the drafting. I was reading the story of Joseph in Genesis and was struck by what was necessary.

We try to get into this guy's head and think about what's necessary to forgive a bunch of brothers who took your dearest possession and left you for dead. What is actually, what kind of person does that? Right. And it's hard. And it's hard. And there's a long road, I think, for most of us to get there, if we've been wrong, to get to a point where we can actually be forgiven by the people that we've wrong. You don't get it for free, you know.

And I wanted to explore a situation where somebody has, you know, in this book, Cam does something. It's really wrong. And he deceived somebody at length throughout the novel, you know, this woman named Roya. And I wanted to see if there was a way to get to forgiveness. And so for me, and I didn't know the answer when I started, really. But I thought I wanted to see if a guy who wants that would be able to get it in the end. You know, how do you research and write? Like, how do you, tell us the process.

The book is so incredibly well researched, frankly. And I really feel like I got an intelligence everything by reading the book. So tell us a little bit about that process. I try to treat my writing like a nine to five as much as I can. Sometimes the podcast does impinge on that. But I try to write 2,000 words a day, usually about five days a week. And I try to get as fast as possible to the essence of a really lousy first draft as quickly as possible as well. And as I'm doing that kind of initial sprint,

I'm not actually thinking too much about a lot of the research that's going to be necessary to make this thing feel like it's holistic story that's well, well researched and has a bunch of details. I'm just kind of getting that thing. And I get that thing. And I think that draft to me is kind of the equivalent of taking a bunch of stuff out of your cabinet, you know, your pantry in the kitchen and putting it down on the countertop. And then saying, all right, I've got.

30 ingredients out here. What kind of meal do I want to make? And then as I move forward, I'm like, okay, I'm going to take all these ingredients. I'm going to make spaghetti of beetballs. And so there's going to be some stuff that I put out on the countertop that I put back. So in the draft, I might delete it, get rid of it entirely whole character's plot lines. But then other things that really need to be brought out.

So like this, you know, ground beef and garlic and parmesan cheese, you know, needs to be turned into, with these spices, need to turn into beetballs. And so here's I'm going to do that. So then there's a bunch of research to kind of refine it, get it really tight. And that happens honestly a lot just through conversations with people. I mean, it's a lot of reading too. But I find that the best stuff is by getting in touch with somebody who really knows and just putting like five questions to them, walking them through a situation and having them play back to you how they would handle it. Some of the best conversations I had about Iran in this book were from people who

would just recently left Tehran who could talk about, here's, you know, here's the kind of dishes we have when we have birthday parties. Here's what traffic is like in this part of town. Here's what the city smells like. Things like that that you're not going to get from reading a book about Iran's foreign policy, but you've got to get down to that human level. So a lot of the research really happens in that way. And then it's just rinse and repeat for like usually 10 drafts and then the book's done. You know, so look, I'm looking forward to the next book, actually. I think you have created a franchise for yourself. where people are going to be like, okay, when's the next book coming out?

I want to chomp down on it. Okay, so we're at, thank you. We're at the point in the podcast where my producer and I, we picked out five words. Okay. And so you're going to give me a one or two sentences. Obviously, there are words from your book. I'm going to say Iran. I say Iran, you think of what?

Civilization. Yeah. I, I'm bullish on Iran. Iran. When I think he'd be Iran, I think of a future story that's quite bullish for Iran. I feel like the thing is burning out. It's probably going to end violently, but I feel like it's burning out. But about Israel? Hopeful, you know, I, I'll use more than two sentences on this one. Yeah, yeah, no, no. Give me a few. I dedicate. I, you know, part of the dedication for this book, beyond that to my, my lovely wife, was for Israel and Iran, for, for. a better future and a better way and just seeing these two these two societies these two governments that are linked in this awful

conflict and looking at sort of the underlying you know the people that are there you just I hope that there's a better way to translate the connection between you know Persia and and Israel because there actually could be I think tremendous as there has been in the not so distant past a tremendously close relationship between the two societies. Something I gleaned from the book and just tell me if my analysis is correct, I feel like Israel is tougher.

A lot of people in the United States feel like, okay, Israel needs the U.S. for its survival, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm not saying that that's not an important alliance. It certainly is. But I feel like Israel is way tougher and way more resilient, autonomously than people think. That's sort of what I got from your book. Is that fair to say?

or am I off on that? No, I think, I mean, I think so. I think certainly there's some external dependencies, right, on us in particular and on that sort of intelligence and security and military connection. But it's, yeah, it's a very, very tough and very resilient society. These people want to survive. It's filled with people who, I think, do what is necessary and sacrifice what necessary to get to get things done, you know. So, no question.

Absolutely. I mean, I'm obviously very impressed with them and wish them well. Okay. Third word, ready, classified. I say the word classified. Well, you know, fortunately or unfortunately, it just makes me think of my podcast, Anthony. You know, classified. I think for me, I think a lot about how sometimes I wish I still had access to it.

you know, I could see what was going on, which occasionally is something that I miss about that world, because I do think there's such a, there can be such a gap between what gets reported and what's actually going on, right? I had the eye opener of eye openers and I went to work in the White House and read the information that was provided in the presidential daily brief. Yes. I guess my only reaction to it was the lack of certainty. You know, the stuff I read in the brief is like, well, it's not Hollywood. You know, we, there's a 50% chance of this. There's a 40% chance of that. I'm like, we don't, you know, we know things, but we don't know things. You know, that was the thing that spooked me, you know, am I wrong in saying that?

No, I think you're absolutely right. I think, you know, anybody, there's, you know, I wrote, I wrote for the PDB, the president's daily brief, primarily under George W. Bush and Obama. and a lot of times the feedback that you'd get from those articles was like deep frustration that you didn't go further, right? I mean, Assad, when Assad was, you know, initially being challenged by protests in 2011, you know, the Obama White House was pissed at us because we weren't taking a strong enough stance on sort of, is this guy going to stay or is you going to go, right? And so there are limits, deep, really important limits, I think, to how far you can go in those kind of products, which make, you know, to your point, make the policymakers. sometimes very frustrated with the intelligence people. But you think about your pocket. You're a good podcaster.

Okay. What makes a good podcaster, David? Well, I mean, I do want to, can I ask you a question? I want to ask you the same thing because I'm very curious in your, in your thoughts. But I'll give you mine. I mean, my thought is that first, the absolutely most essential thing, especially in a podcast where like Gordon and I, we're, we're partnered in doing this together and we're feeding off of each other. If you're downloading our pod, you're listening to it regularly, you're to some

degree signing up for the interaction between me and Gordon. You want to be part of that conversation. So you want to be, you want to side, like if Gordon and I are having a conversation at a bar, you as a listener are saying, I would like to just pull up a stool next to them and kind of listen it to what they're saying because you like the banter or the chemistry. So that's like the first one. I think the second one is you do have there has to be something there. And so the content has got to be dialed into a point where you feel like you're giving somebody something valuable, something that they cannot get elsewhere. And in our world, it's kind of pulling back the curtain on. Well, you could read, look, you could you could read a bunch of articles about what happened in Venezuela.

You can be up to date on the news in Iran, but we're going to go to a level beyond that and give you. is something that you can't get elsewhere. No, listen. What do you think? Well, I think you do that in a little bit more, though, actually. I think that you're providing a cocktail conversation, meaning like I want to listen to your podcast because I want to be made smarter when I'm having a conversation on subjects that you're more of an expert on than me.

And so I like listening in. I'm sort of eavesdropping on the conversation because I'm like, wow, okay. and by the way, you can tell Gordon, I said this. I plagiarized from the two of you, okay? I don't give you any credit for it. I will take that as a high. You don't need to. I'll take that as a high compliment.

I plagiarized. I learned that from the rest is classified. Let me just start spewing that, you know, which is good. You know, but I listen, I think you guys are great at it and I wish you continued success. And I'm sorry I called you consipated, okay? I have to offer you a public apology here. I just, you know, I get frustrated about this JFK thing because, you know, you know, You know, I don't know.

Well, take a look at this. Take a look at the Zapritor film. That's all I have to say, okay? I mean, if he wasn't around, you guys would have gotten away with it, okay? But, you know, he was there, okay? You know that when we, when we're doing the live show in London, Gordon and I are having a friendly debate about what is the, what is the greatest or most significant intelligence failure in history?

And I'm presenting the Kennedy assassination. Yeah. Not as a, not from a sort of a conspiracy standpoint, but from a standpoint. It's a gigantic intelligence failure. I'm with. We're coming back to it. I'm with you on that. All right.

I get two more words for you, okay? I'm going to, it's actually three letters. Okay, CIA. I say the CIA. You say what? Bipolar institution. I think of the CIA, my mental model for the place. There's a lot of different ways you can look at it.

But when I think about it, I think about, well, I think about this story. And I put a version of this in my first novel, Damascus Station, which is there was a day when I was about two years in at the agency. And I got read into a program to look at footage from a surveillance drone, not a, not a predator or anything, but a surveillance drone. We had this drone over a really hard target's military installation. They didn't know it was there. Again, this was 15 years ago. And you're looking at the footage from that and you're thinking, this is something straight out of a spy novel. I can't believe we have this.

I cannot believe the CIA has this platform. And then I go upstairs and we're out of staplers. And we're out of staplers because procurement didn't, had not put in the proper office supply order. I remember thinking I can't believe the same institution that feel of this amazing capability also can't get the office supply order right. And I think for people outside the agency who are kind of accustomed to coming at it through the lens of Hollywood, the best way to think, about the CIA is it's bipolar. So you've got all the big bureaucratic, ridiculous stuff, and then you've got this super high stakes mission, and it's all rolled up together. I hadn't thought of it that way. When I think of the CIA, I think of good intentions

and sometimes bad outcomes. That's what I think of, but generally good intentions. Okay, well, the last word. I don't know I'm going to give you the last word. I say the word, the Persian. You say what? Go buy it. I certainly want people to go by it. When I think of the Persian, what do you think of? When I think of the Persian, I think of a human story. It's got everything. It's got intrigue.

It's got humanity in it. It's got an explanation of, as you point out, these two great civilizations that are warring with each other, but they're really warring with each other for the wrong reasons. They actually have natural inclinations to be. be brothers and sisters. And so it's a, it's a phenomenal story. There's, there's Shakespearean elements to your story. There's a tragedy going on. Yeah. Between the Romulus and the Capulets. You know, there's a, there's a tragedy going on where it doesn't necessarily have to happen. And so it's a brilliant book. Thank you, David McCloskey. He's the former CIA analyst,

bestselling author. He's the podcast host of the goalhanger of the rest is classified. And the title of this book is the Persian and novel. And David's right. Go out and buy the book. I think you'll really enjoy it. And you'll get hooked on his writing. Thank you so much for joining us today. Anthony, great to be with you. Thanks for having me. When a country's productivity cycle is broken, people feel it in their paychecks, their communities, their futures. What does this mean for individuals, communities, and businesses across the country? Join business leaders, policymakers, and influencers for CG's national series on the Canadian's standard of living, productivity and innovation. Learn what's driving Canada's

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